A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

Apparently this is a good week for Lazy Reading links, cause I have lots! If you have any specific suggestions of where to find more links, I’d welcome them. I’m sure there’s more people to follow that come up with tidbits like these…

Insane Calculations In Bash. Ostensibly, it describes all the work required to convert number series to “sparks” (inline UTF-8-based graphs) using bash. What it really shows is how far down the paths of madness shell programming can take you.

From the same person, It Came From The Hold Space, a description of how crappy things could be pre-1990 or so when, say, sed was the most capable tool you had. Read the presentation description first. Bonus: the presentation explains a non-acronym source for the name “grep”.

Michael Lucas published his sales numbers so far for SSH Mastery. (reviewed by me here, totally worth buying) The interesting takeaway for me was that despite the reach of Amazon, Smashwords was more profitable – and I like the variety of Smashwords’ DRM-free formats more.

Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak. An animator in the UK; I like the rhythmic repetition in his (occasionally disturbing) animations.

As I mentioned last week, DragonFly developer Venkatesh Srinivas is collecting pledges for his crazy-long bike ride, raising funds for cancer patient support. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my mother died from cancer in a long, agonizing process some years ago. The support system funded by these pledges would have helped us tremendously. Please donate a few dollars to ease someone else’s burden.

Look at the new Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. It’s like the 1979-era blue book “basic D&D” set with a bit of polish and refinement. Meant for people who have one evening free once a month to hack monsters and steal treasure. http://www.goodmangames.com/5070preview.html.